Americans REALLY don’t know their own religions

A new study by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life suggests that Americans really don’t know much about their own religion:

More than four-in-ten Catholics in the United States (45 percnt) do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ. About half of Protestants (53 percent) cannot correctly identify Martin Luther as the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant Reformation, which made their religion a separate branch of Christianity. Roughly four-in-ten Jews (43 percent) do not recognize that Maimonides, one of the most venerated rabbis in history, was Jewish.

The chart below breaks down the respondents’ accuracy on the Pew quiz: